A Second Look: Mrs. Rowe’s Restaurant Cookbook

[maggiethecat]

I don’t need any more cookbooks! I’m not going to buy one more cookbook, unless, of course, something really special comes out. I can look up any cuisine, any culinary nook and cranny in the hundreds of cookbooks that stretch to the ceiling in my kitchen bookcases, and the boxes in the garage. Sephardic, check. Polish, check. Escoffier, check. Mennonite, check. Vietnamese, Lithuanian, scones, muffins, cupcakes, Fanny Farmer 1922 – check. (Why is an American first edition of “The Man with the Golden Gun” nestling between “The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook” and “The Nero Wolfe Cookbook?”?)

I’ve set on a course that’s like saying: “We don’t buy one damn thing to eat unless the freezer’s empty.” It’s time to check out all those spines in the bookcases and see what I’ve neglected or missed out on since my French friend Ida presented me with Francoise Bernard’s “Cuisine Facile” at my bridal shower.

I have a beauty: “Mrs. Rowe’s Restaurant Cookbook” by Mollie Cox Bryan (10 Speed 2006.) It’s a biography, with recipes (and a forward by the Sterns) of Mildred Rowe and her eponymous restaurant in Staunton, Virginia. The subtitle is “A Lifetime of Recipes from the Shenandoah Valley.”

I wonder how many of you feel a psychic shift when you read a cookbook? With the great ones (Elizabeth David, Jane Grigson, Andrea Nguyen, Marcella Hazan, Jacques Pepin, Charles Ranhoffer – just for starters) I feel time and food transforming the Gastronomical Me. “Mrs. Rowe’s” does it for me.

I’m Northern and urban. Mildred is Southern and country, but her recipe for Chicken Fried Steak morphed me. (Until last year I’d never tasted it, let alone cooked it.) I became a more generous, centered cook – how could I not, after making a batch of her (yeast based) Alabama Biscuits? The Cream of Potato and Bacon Soup, the Creamed Turkey on Biscuits, the Brown Sugar Pound Cake, her special Chow Chow, and her Southern Fried Chicken – the recipes work and they taste good. Really good -- third helpings good. There’s garlic salt, ketchup and Crisco aplenty -- it’s the best quality, least snobbish recipe book imaginable.

I guess Mildred and I have something in common: “Salmon Cakes with White Sauce, “page 131. It’s made with canned salmon, dried parsley and “2 cups thick White Sauce.”

My English grandmother made the same recipe, down to the dried parsley, and called it “White Sauce” not Béchamel. just as Mildred did. When my most exacting critic, the SuperTuscan – who hates white sauces – said “Let’s make this again next week, “I knew why Mrs. Rowe’s customers were regulars. (The gingham apron with rioting rickrack got me into character.)

Full disclosure: I’ve acquired ten new cookbooks in the last month – I’m a shameless recidivist. But I’m gonna reform, I swear. Francoise Bernard rocks.

[Anna N]

. . .

My English grandmother made the same recipe, down to the dried parsley, and called it “White Sauce” not Béchamel. just as Mildred did. When my most exacting critic, the SuperTuscan – who hates white sauces – said “Let’s make this again next week, “I knew why Mrs. Rowe’s customers were regulars. (The gingham apron with rioting rickrack got me into character.)

Full disclosure: I’ve acquired ten new cookbooks in the last month – I’m a shameless recidivist.  But I’m gonna reform, I swear. Francoise Bernard rocks.

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Such memories you evoke, Maggie! I grew up on salmon cakes and white sauce and it was considered quite fancy food! I went back to England for a visit sometime in the 70s during April. I remember it as the coldest most miserable vacation of my life. My elderly and much loved Aunt made this for me and, ingrate that I was, I HATED it. I wanted something meaty and filling and CANADIAN.

Since then, though, I have re-discovered how tasty this can be and have made it on a number of occasions when the cupboards were bare. Not dried parsley though! It has to be fresh.

It took a very long time for me to make the connection between white sauce and bechamel. Who knew that I was doing classical French cooking way back then!

I, too, am trying to kick the cookbook habit but until they invent Methadone for addicts like us, I don't think I'll get anywhere.

[maggiethecat]

it has to be fresh. 

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Yes, it does, and I used fresh parsley.

What makes me laugh and one of the reasons I love this book is that it's all about what tastes good. Um, no CIA grads here from the founders to the current chefs, one of whom is a grandson. Page 79, Tomato-Basil Soup, which would never have appeared on a Mildred menu anymore than it would in a two star Italian place.

Aaron and Karl Craig , a Rowe's chef, combined efforts to create this soup. They tried to make it with pureed fresh tomatoes, but the fresh tomatoes did not work as well as condensed tomato soup.

The recipe is olive oil, the usual mirepoixed suspects, two cans of condensed tomato soup and two cups of heavy cream. The basil is dried.

I don't know if I can bring myself to buy canned tomato soup, but this is a recipe written for a legendary restaurant. It's probably pretty good. Hello, Campbell's.

Edited October 14, 2008 by maggiethecat (log)

[Shoom]

I grew up near Staunton, Virginia and have been to Rowe's many a times - your post brought back great memories, Maggie. If you ever get the chance to go to the restaurant, you have to try the coconut cream or banana cream pies. Rowe's is downright famous for their pies.